iLike Growing Quickly, Still Massively Trailing Last.fm

Later today music social network iLike will report that they’ve reached half a million registered users in the first four months since launching. What won’t be disclosed, but I’m hearing from insiders, is that around 20,000 new users are joining daily.

The company, along with MOG, will present at the Digital Music Forum East conference in New York tomorrow. Together the two companies are America’s best answer to the Last.fm viral machine, which sees 15 million unique visitors per month and dominates the social music space. Last.fm is headquartered in London.

The backbone of all three companies (iLike, MOG and Last.fm) is the gathering of meta data on users listening habits - all three have software that monitors what users listen to - and then integrating that data into their respective social networks. When I met with the Last.fm executive team last week in London, they told me they’ve collected over 500 million pieces of user data to date, which they call “scrobbels” (they are gathering something like 175 new scrobbels per second). Last.fm is the MySpace of the music based social networks.